Solution Requirements
The Enterprise Content Management solution chosen demonstrated retention capability and the ability to interface with other systems. In addition, the system offered ease of use and navigation, affordability and a base package capable of meeting all of the District's immediate needs.
The centralized solution meets the diverse needs of several departments while preserving the integrity of documents in each. Easily configurable, the system allows administrators to set up various document types and user groups with specific parameters. IISD was also able to create user rights that prevent unauthorized viewing or modification of files.
In the IISD Business Office, checks, invoices and receipts are scanned into an Accounts Payable module and cross-referenced with a COLD report. As a result, users can quickly navigate from one document to another by simply double-clicking. The ECM's autofill capability reduce indexing labor by automatically populating keyword fields for the checks with data captured from the COLD report.
Having the COLD documents in the repository makes it much easier to gather relevant information from reports that may be as long as 5,000 to 6,000 pages while eliminating the expense of printing them. Users can perform text searchers of these documents and view them either as a text file or with an overlay that identically represents the printed version.
In the Special Education Department, the challenge was maintaining, retrieving and purging closed student records which, by law, must be retained for seven years after the end of service. Documents ranging from 400-500 pages needed to be quickly accessed, and storage space was an ongoing problem. The Department now scans about 50 closed folders each day for storage. The system is configured to automatically detect when a record reaches the seven-year mark, and after notifying the parents, Document Retention supports the destruction of the record.
Instead of retaining a room full of banker's boxes as it once did, IISD now scans about 50 closed folders each day and stores them in the ECM system. When a file is requested, clerks no longer have to search through boxes, but can instantly retrieve and print directly from the system. "We were amazed how quickly documents can be retrieved and printed out on demand," notes Michael Wall EDMS (electronic document management system) manager at IISD. "And the quality of those images is just as good as making photocopies."
Document retention of the ECM system are configured to automatically detect when a file has reached the seven-year mark. Once the school district advertises that parents have the option to claim the file and the required period has passed, the records are destroyed. In the past, the Special Education Department had found it necessary to hire a truck equipped with a shredder to come to the school annually and dispose of the records.
In the Superintendent's Office, agendas, notes, documents and minutes are scanned into the ECM repository. In addition to using keywords to retrieve documents, these files can also be searched for specific text within the document itself. After scanning, a text rendition of each image is created by using an OCR (optical character recognition) module. As a result, it is much easier to complete research on these documents.
Prior to implementing the Enterprise Content Management system, each of the five division superintendents maintained their own notebooks of administrative documents that had to be preserved for five years or more. ECM provides one online "notebook" that can be used by all of the divisions, reducing redundant labor and wasted resources.
To meet the auditor's recommendation to create a disaster recovery strategy, the server on which the ECM system is run is mirrored. In the event that the primary server fails for some reason, the mirrored server can be put into operation and the data can be preserved. On a regular basis, the server is also backed up using a tape autoloader.
